This Is Only an Intermission

“This is only an intermission.”

I could cry as I type this quote from the video below.

Theater is one of those art forms that seems to require a gathered assembly of people as part of its essential nature. An audience — even an audience of just one single live human being breathing and sharing the same air and time and place and space with the performers — is critical for a show. The audience receives the communication from the stage and responds, and that response reverberates back up onto the stage and incites more communication. Back and forth, like breathing, or tossing a hot potato or playing tag. This is the magic theater conjures: the communion of humans in real-time. And this is not possible right now.

Please watch this video. I’ve had the privilege of working with so many of these brave and wonderful people over the years. They’re theater-makers who are heroically forging through what amounts to a swarm of murder hornets for artists.

Watch the video, and then please take your seats!

Act II is about to begin.

photo credit: Anthony Chiang

Julie Rhodes is a freelance writer and actor in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. She writes regularly for Madeworthy magazine and the Tanglewood Moms blog.